Department of Theology

Warren T. Reich, founder and director of Georgetown University's Project for the History of Care, is Distinguished Research Professor of Religion and Ethics in the Georgetown University Theology Department and Professor Emeritus of Bioethics in the Georgetown University School of Medicine. As a founding member of the University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics starting in 1971, he created the award-winning Encyclopedia of Bioethics between 1971 and 1978, and a fully revised five-volume edition between 1990 and 1995 –– an interdisciplinary work that played a major role in establishing the field of bioethics and an on-going role in shaping the field. He established and for 20 years directed the Bioethics and Medical Humanities program in the Georgetown University Medical Center, between 1977 and 1997.

Dr. Reich has been a Fellow of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina; von Humboldt Visiting Professor at the University of Tuebingen; Senior Fellow in the Graduate Program in Law, Ethics, and Medicine, University of Melbourne Law School; Senior Fellow in the Center for Research in the Humanities, University of New South Wales, Sydney; Senior Fellow in the Zentrum für Europäische Integrationsforschung (Center for European Integration Studies), University of Bonn; Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania; Visiting Professor at the Australian Catholic University; Visiting Fellow in the Trent Institute of Culture at the University of Trent, and Visiting Lecturer at the Universities of Vienna, Genova, Macerata (where he received the doctorate in philosophy honoris causa), Leuven, Sydney, Queensland (Brisbane), Tuebingen, Freiburg, Messina, Copenhagen, Madrid, and La Plata (Argentina), as well as in Venezuela, France, Finland, and Japan.

From 1962 to 1971 Professor Reich taught moral theology, principally at the Catholic University of America; he was also a founding professor of the Washington Theological Union. Pursuing graduate studies in Catholic Moral Theology under the direction of Josef Fuchs, Professor Reich earned the Doctor of Sacred Theology degree (S.T.D.) at the Gregorian University in Rome and did post-doctoral studies under Alfons Auer at the University of Würzburg in Germany.

Professor Reich’s current interests are primarily with the history of the idea of care and secondarily with methodological and historical questions pertaining to bioethics.